Last Wednesday's post was about Oracle's choice (or failure to make one) about which of the various IDEs it's created/inherited to support. It's an important issue, but one largely of interest to the relatively small audience of professional developers. So imagine my surprise today when I discovered that the release of a new Java IDE had made the mainstream newspaper of record, the New York Times.

Now, you won't find the initialism IDE anywhere in the article (although the Times would probably render it "I.D.E.", since they do write "U.S.B."). That's because the IDE in question is Google App Inventor for Android, which is specifically tailored to help people with no programming experience create Android apps by linking together icons representing blocks of functionality in a browser-based application; jargon, like "IDE", is deliberately being kept to a minimum. But it's undeniably a development environment, and, since the apps in question are built for Android, it's undeniably Java under the hood. It's based on MIT's Open Blocks; manipulating the blocks that the users see autogenerates code in Kawa, an implementation of Scheme written in Java, which is ultimately compiled into Android-friendly bytecode that can be uploaded to the user's phone via USB (or U.S.B., as the Times would have it).

The announcement made quite a splash in tech circles as well; Computerworld had a nice roundup of the reactions, much of which, nicely encapsulated by TechCrunch's MG Sielger, involved a conflict between love of more openness and fear that the Google Apps Marketplace will be flooded with low-quality dreck. As a professional writer/editor/Web guy who constantly feels the competition from Demand Media and other content farms, I feel their pain, but I do have to note very little of the App Inventor promotional material focuses on creating apps for sale; they more seem to be about tinkering, and creating things that would be useful for you.

Anyway, the fact that this made a splash at all is more indication that Harmony (or at least its Android variant) is the most important Java SE implementation out there. People really care about this particular tool for Java development! And, as Sielger suggests, people who cut their teeth on this tool may eventually decide they want to write real code -- and that will mean more Java developers.